


Love is Madness

by nigellecter (orphan_account)



Category: Charlie Countryman (2013), Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-20
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-04-25 05:55:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 9,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14372352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/nigellecter
Summary: Roleplay between nigellecter and velnias-x. Young!Nigel and Hannibal.A thread based on a Thirty Seconds to Mars song, 'Love is Madness.'





	1. Chapter 1

Out of his element here under the neon lights, the bass shook the floor as he took another long drag from his cigarette. His veins still pulsed from the  **pills**  he took his vision was still hazed. His mind was lighter at least his vision blurred with the neon that danced across his face. His body didn’t burn like it had with the   **Sodium thiopental.** Right now he was trying to forget,  **not remember.** Hannibal’s eyes flick up to Nigel’s form on the level above him and grimaced to see that he engaged in conversation with another client. He shouldn’t be here Hannibal knew that much. If Nigel knew he was there, there might be hell to pay,or worst he might do something  **stupid.**

His mind was **a violent daydream** thinking ‘ **you are crazy a perfect liar’** Broken thoughts shine on the surface of Hannibal’s eyes. If this was regret and rejection it burned on his mouth like a cheap shot. Dully he looks out at the people dancing against the grunge and smoke. He feels  **separate,** separate from the energy and sense of living that was all around him. Against the vivid color of reality, Hannibal’s vision was  **grey**. Emotion didn’t come easy not since the horror had plucked itself from his mind. Nigel hadn’t come back in two days and with that, it had been three nights since.  **I knew the moment I looked into your eyes** ,  **love is madness.**

Was it a mistake? It burned him to think Nigel was running from him.  It sickened him to realize there was a pain there. Real feelings he thought he had only given to one person bit down like a penny between the teeth. He was angry. He was confused. Did this mean he loved him?  **I knew the moment** ,  **love is madness. A dangerous game, love. love.**

Hungry eyes on him now, Hannibal managed to simper at the pretty face looking his way. His head tilted slightly watching her turn and walk to where he stood. He leaned his head down to her level as she said ‘hello.’ Allowed her slender hand to run through his hair when she asked him to dance.  He hated the idea but found he was moving through the crowd anyway.  Hips bump and grind to the heavy beats of music. Her arms were around his neck as she swayed into him in her own slow rhythm. Her nails at his neck she draws his dark maroon eyes to hers. She had a beautiful smile but Hannibal wanted none of it.  

The back of his neck prickled and he looked up in another flash of neon and saw Nigel looking down at him. Oh, how their eyes linger then. Hannibal bore into him then.  **No mask**. Just anger and regret burning in the endless night of Lecter’s eyes.  **‘You are crazy a perfect liar. Said you’d save me.’** The thoughts popped between them like a burning fuse. ‘ **I know the moment I looked into your eyes I’d had to swallow all your lies.’** Hannibal smiled at him then and within the same beat turns his lips on the woman in his arms. The heat between his lips as he caught that she was smiling at him. He wouldn’t feel guilty pushing his hands down her neck as she joined him in the shared kiss.

What was the point of reading into Nigel’s gaze now?  Even if they both wanted it. It wouldn’t happen.

I never said that  **I would be your lover**  
 ~~I never said~~ that I would be your friend  
 **I never said that**  I would take no other  
 **Be your lover**  
 ~~Never said~~

* * *

 

> _I know the moment I looked into your eyes  
>  I’d had to swallow all your lies   
>  _

_Is madness contagious?_  He asks himself again for the first time after a long while. He lies in the bed, remotely far from the middle of the  **blinding dark**  and the  **deafening darkness**  that had once surround him.  ****As searing pain rushes to brew upward from within, _concurrently_ , the force of rushing blood works against the acute drumming suffering as the  **despicable arousal** onslaughts his taut, petrified form. 

As soon as the surge of  _subjugation_ completely overwhelms him, the man is already pulling away from him with a choking grasp and a  **distinctive teeth mark** underneath the gleam of his perspiration as scalding liquid brims over his diaphanous whiskey gaze. His minds are always drifting towards ambiguity; he wants Hannibal, but he does not at the same time. Yet, there’s a purpose and clarity within his  _vehement, destitute hazel_ \- that speaks of wretchedness as he tries to muster his strength in this muddled mind of his. 

Spurted amalgamation of  _blood_ and  _release_ , spills forth between Nigel’s legs like an  **erupted volcano** , magma free flowing along with his  _untouched, body-wrecking_ overflow. The assailing assault of the client continues even after **staggering orgasm** , as their merged form continues to slither and rut away in a  _fierce_ ,  _frenzied_ and malignant act. Sinking into the quagmire of humiliation of his  **sleazy release**  and scalding blood continuing to pool underneath his inner thighs, his  **zoned nonchalance** sketches through Nigel’s unreadable expression. 

Through **fading cognizance** , he feels the unbreakable pulsating spasm still course through the angrily protruding cords and veins of his debauched body. 

* * *

_Is sadness contagious?_ He asks hiimself as he leaves the light on in the next room, where he  **recouperates** within the painful gray area where friends kiss and lovers don’t show up in public places, but he has never regretted it. How there are tiny fires in his skin and small hurricanes in his eyes; still unwashed and retaining the  **incorrigible ecstasy**  of before. That damned fringing silk serving as a line that manifests his unconcealed form to be like a puppet under a puppeteer’s unforgiving maneuver as the silence of the breeze turns its heat up - and his irises shake and swell. As if woken by a tectonic plates shifting. Maybe he was a burning envy - and a sickness that he fed right inside his guts. 

He would be taken by others, but he’d never been broken into two hundred pieces when a  **deep hollow void**  that speaks volumes shoots past Hannibal’s knowing gaze. And his thoughts all incline inward, as a feeling of longing and disappointed depression scoops his heart. 

Not even when  **adrenaline** was rushing through his veins as he still stays awake at 2am in the morning of the sex; and the next - while he listens closely to the sound of Hannibal’s flickering maroon gaze, penetrating through his soul.  _As if asking what’s life without living on the edge, without hanging everything that he’s on a tightrope and hope it does not collapse._  

He knows, deep inside, no **visceral thrill**  comes as the ambiance of the club thrum his heartbeat nor the client’s invasive, mindless gaze of savagery smolder becomes much less than the blue spokes of moonlight above. It merely  **rotates** and  **eggs** his conscious like the same orbital neon of the illuminations above. His subconscious still dreams of violent desire, as he daydreams wiithin the forgotten mirage of sleep. The bloodshot eyes speaking of insanity, as his body turns automatic with the rising sun. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

The heavy throng of the bass shivers through him as the long stare goes on. Unblinking it seems Hannibal feels a shift in his mind. Another image of Nigel blurs with his glossy bloodshot eyes. It’s him only twelve face blue in the winter cast of the woods outside the cabin. His cheeks are blazed with the cold. A blink and it is gone. Keeping Nigel’s eyes on him Hannibal turns on  **him.**  He turns on **himself.** He chooses  **anger**  because it is easier than dwelling on a sinking  **attachment.**

The woman must have misread what was gaging in the young man’s eyes. Anger and desire are parallel. She can’t see him or the violence in his eyes. Her slender hand frisks the front of his pants as they continue to dance. Hips bump and roll to the music and her hand slips inside pass his waistband. His lids are half close to her warm touch while the part of him looking through him is **taut.**  Hannibal disdains the heavy heat of human contact, right now it was his trigger. He seized her wrist and leans closer to her ear all the while his eyes don’t leave Nigel’s.

Hannibal weights the shame in those  _‘twin’_  eyes and silently he knew he didn’t care to share it.  _‘I didn’t think you were going to shut down on me. It doesn’t matter, does it? No matter who it’s with you’ll put yourself in a shit hole like this mentally. I won’t be just another stain on your sheets. Goodbye Nigel.’_  Hannibal Lecter knows he isn’t quite himself. Knows that manipulating the heart is easiest through someone’s pain and self-reflection.  **He isn’t quite himself** love doesn’t fit here.  **He isn’t quite himself**  its safer he leaves.

A headline in the papers the following morning  **GIRL FOUND SLAIN** outside the nightclub. 

Snips from the article as follows;

Victim was found in the earlier hours Sunday morning. Others in the press are calling it a ‘lust taboo.’ She was found in the back alley of a local club. Graffiti was on the wall over her body  **‘Love is Madness.’**

* * *

 

His hazel,  _submerged_ beneath the inky black that seeps darker and darker by the heartbeat retracts further into his deep-ridged eye sockets. A  **looming darkness** as he lines up the vivid and visceral images provided so aptly by his own recollections. A steady pummel of his heartbeat continues to be fueled by the  **close proximity** ,  _intermingling_ ,  _coalescing_ with the intense clash of aura; yet, he faces the **isolated quietness** , despite having blinded and washed over in waves. Drawn away from the smoldering heat of the client resonating behind him as the masqueraded remarks does not invoke further attempts to adhere himself with the profound desire. 

A beautifully  _terrifying_ and wretchedly  _enthralling_ thought surfaces instead, as his twinged hazel screams of  **sadness** ,  _tainted with regret_  - hopeful echoes of what could have been.  **A rhythm of his bones**  serve as the reminder as a pounding whisper of his breath wanes. If only - it’s dark and he is dark. He’s bone and he’s sniew - he’s space in-between the stars and if he could just rip through this vigorous exhaustion - while he desperately wished all of this, a merely constructed fairy tale to be simply a  **resorted chicanery** , a mind had a _clever trick_ up its sleeve.

While his brain and subconsciousness defiantly refused to believe such  **blasphemy** , the _withered expanse_ of his skin, the color had long drained out of every pore as if he had been a **soulless cadaver**.  _Brittled_ and  _creaking_ bones, the graying colors of the night already seeped into his skin as he locks himself behind the veiled surroundings,  _obscured_ even further by the **blackened smoke**. Details frayed as it only exists in shattered fragments. What was dazzlingly _exquisite_ and  _incomparable_ before reduces down to the blackness, the **nihilistic melancholy** takes over as if his essence had been plucked right out of his thriving heart. 

It’s  _ripping_ at his flesh, and it’s  _drinking_ his marrow and it grows to fit the gaps of his mind as he recalls a terrible, tragic lie Hannibal and he has exchanged. And it breathes the  **long-settled dust** from his lungs that he cannot sink into torporous shuteye - his wounds still reminds him that Hannibal’s out there somewhere, continuing to build an entirely different universe that’s much hopeful from what he’s entrapped in. He never thought he’d mingle in  **blood** and  **sweat** , in the soil of a foreign land as a stranger brands him and he does not struggle. He merely  _forages_ for something that does not exist. He burrows deep into the darkness, because  **arbitrary rage of affection**  gets him high; higher than all those fucking stars. 

Beneath the destitute solitary between the darkest night and the break of dawn, he surrounds himself against the  _stirring dust_ and  _sharp edges_ of the nippy air as the **scent of death**  hangs heavy like overripe fruit on overburned trees waiting to go slack with relief. Nothing is slack about the young woman’s corpse as her skin crumbled like  _papyrus_ , a feast of red marking an  **erosion of bone** as the dark stained walls beyond her both  _petrifies_ and  _blossoms_ his fanning flames; a fire to cull away the tangle of limbs and longing and pave way for a **new horizon** registered in his way. 

 


	3. Chapter 3

Tunnel vision down the dark alley a white stream of light spreads along the base of the narrow space. Hannibal is black and faceless. His perfect outline is sharp where it lacks detail  **he is a still shadow**. He can smell Nigel under his nose and takes a breath to ignore the scent of liquor and sex. It turns him like an empty stomach. The cigarettes and booze, the cheap soap and hard water can’t ever completely wash ‘ **them** ’ off Nigel’s skin. Hannibal see’s the fingerprints they leave on him. The cuts and scrapes he always looked so pleaded. **It was sickening.**

“Did they hurt you?” Hannibal asks leaning his head back to the night sky. His dead expression might impress upon the hidden stars his  **deep longing**  now pleaded on the wall behind them. “You have a fresh cut on your lip, did you get tired of biting the pillow?”

The shadow that was Hannibal Lecter strode forward smoothly. The hand the seized Nigel’s chin was clean but reeked of  **blood**  and  **flowers**  perhaps a hint of the girl’s perfume. Usually, Hannibal’s touch is unusually warm and when he touches Nigel’s face the familiar **sparks**  in his eyes would register in his own. Those same maroon eyes were vacant and dead and his touch was cooler. It was just a nick in Nigel’s lip he let go after turning his face to the moonlight. His knuckles brush under Nigel’s chin as he pulled away.

“you look like shit. Go home.” He looks back then sideways to his counterpart. It wasn’t  _‘lets go home’_  the kindles in Hannibal’s voice wasn’t there.

* * *

_ “The police have already been called. Shit. Don’t worry about the police. Just find the bastard who carved up the girl.  **Nigel**  find him before he gets too far.” _

Footsteps in the alley coming from the club. If Hannibal felt a sense of flight he didn’t show it. The fingers of his left hand twitch once and are still. What came over Hannibal then was pure instinct. His hand grips Nigel’s forearm in protective posture pulling him closer.

_ “Nigel… Nigel is that you?” _

Hannibal grimaced at the vodka odor on the man’s breath he could smell him several feet away. The other one with him had softer footsteps and the goatish odor of sex and sweat. Something else too and it drained him he smelled Nigel on the other man. He didn’t have to look at his companion’s face to see it was a client.

Hannibal doesn’t fight the grip he lets them pull him from behind. Away from Nigel, their eyes meet. A well-dressed gentleman crosses in front of Hannibal he has a stained smile to go along with that strong breath and the smell of dirty sheets.

“Who’s this? Your brother Nigel he looks like you? Were you the one who carved up that girl? I could tell his boss you know and get this pretty boy in a lot of nasty business.” 

Every time the man looked at him hell burned in the depths of his eyes.  _He was waiting._

Hannibal blinked once. I _n the silence of his mind,_ he hears the  **ticking**  of a clock and the swing of a  **metronome**  in the depth of his headspace. He could stun the one holding him but it wouldn’t be enough time to reach his knife tucked at the back of his hip.  **Seconds** were like the small  **clicks**  behind his eyelids. He shifted to see the man behind him. the muscles in the cheek bunch and Hannibal is greeted by his foul breath.

Back to the man in front of him now.

“I’ve seen you around here before, Nigel’s lost puppy perhaps?” When the man in front of him was close enough to smell him Hannibal shifted his eyes over to Nigel  _seeing nothing he could name._

“Does he fuck you too?” he asked.

“We tried that…it didn’t end well.” Hannibal replied  _That bit too much,_ but the men were laughing. Laughing so hard the  _veins in their necks were visible._

“You can’t keep it up?”

“It’s a personal problem.” Hannibal retorts dryly at his own expense.

“Then should I kill you here or give you to the police?” The man turns to Nigel and with the devil’s glance says.

“Keep your trash out of the club Nigel.”

He turns on his heel and with the right nod meets Hannibal’s eyes. The steel bites between the ribs.  The man holding Hannibal pulls the knife, a short jab that sends his nerves haywire. He see’s through the bright spots and ripping gash. No sound crosses his lips the pain isn’t on his face.  It’s the fabric of his  **conscience**  ripping and  **bleeding**  out. Scream’s fill his head while Hannibal went away to get away from the pain. His  **memory palace.**  His _mother’s room peaceful with its many scents and painted clouds. **Her face lifeless in the snow.**_

The knife hit him right as he sank his teeth into the man’s throat ripping it open. As the man screamed and pulled away Hannibal’s face came away  **bloody.**  He spits the rag of flesh from his mouth like it was  **trash**. If ever you saw a spark of  **rage**  it was then. Those dark maroon eyes gleaming in  _violence._  Flickers of light in their dark center like  **fireflies** in his night.

* * *

He imbibes in the **feast of suffering** , yet he does not let it  _unravel_ too much of his punctured thoughts. He doesn’t need an  **unleashing gush**  of blood to alert the fucking vultures of his affliction; for their sole interest are the ones that are most  _unkind_ and circle around his head in a _ritual of blind torture_. He knows who they are; as they’d dump their rotten flesh over his being, so-called  **ichor** of their release,  _threatening_  his  **hardened disguise** that bears all the lies. 

Spreadiing the  **disease** with no  _pity_ , no  _remorse_ ; if only he could pass this life off as one short ditty of the night’s nightmare, he would bypass the infestation of his degredation and isolate all the damned beating hearts and dissect, skewer them to let them exsanguinate. 

Voice gruff like an echoing reverberation of a leopard’s **frenetic revving heart** , the lean muscle continues to beat against the slatted ribs, threatening to seep through the opening as  _ear-splitting sensation_  strangulates his psyche. He could still feel Hannibal’s fingers dance around his skin, hovering close as they talked about the  **expectant future**. He might not be in the center of the  _viewfinder_ as he had withdrawn himself to be a supporting character, a mere plaything in the midst of bigger, mature predators, but still, it’s hard to imagine and remember life before them. Perhaps he’d even thank them for shaping him into a steel. The fresh tinge of metallic bitterness contours through the malleable steel of his frame; ever-changing and unpredictable. 

The truth is  **deathly cold**  - as hazel eyes harvest more dead crops of his emotional trauma beneath another onslaught of  **fabricated delirium**  wrote over his newly invaded residence. “It’s _none_ of your fucking business - since when did you care about my **fading sustenance**?” How blood pooling in his chest wraps around like a noose, dragging it around until it ruptures. No words ring truth as the vacancy washes over his eyes. Perhaps, despite his  _hypocritical_ , _vehemently firm stance_ , he wants to reach out,  **be touched further**. Yet, the portals of his universe prevents him from expanding in the truth of love and trust. 

His existence merely revolves around these tight four walls, as he remains a caged-in animal, pacing back and forth until his inevitable consumption. His body is not a temple; but an acid bath. His mind isn’t a palace; it’s a fucking  **tormenting funhouse** that always has the first and final laugh. There’s no  _wavering_ , sliding beneath the adamant grasp as the pounding of his chest and absolute revile repulsion agglomerates. He clungs onto his soul with a strength born out of **etched darkness** ,  **violence** and  **desperation**. And in that moment of both petrification and catalistic ram of push, he becoomes a fucking offspring of  **undeserved violence** , living through the polyphony of  _desolateness_ and  _bloodlust_.

> _In the depth of his mind, a masterpiece exists; something that hasn’t gone unfurled, yet solidified so many times in his reverie that it becomes automatic. He still reminiscences of the **gruesome display**  of ravaged earth. Bullies screaming their fucking lungs out in such a portent manner as the sun-baked earth seeps with sticky substance and blood, along with the impenetrable layer of translucent skin taut over the cracked open ribcage as if their bodies had been disfigured to fit inside a chrysalis. The otherworldly creature, in exact replica of Hannibal’s exotic European face, like his, yet the identical features become more **monstrosity** of the  **emaciated** looking, creature with exsiccated skin piercingly gazing into the deep chamber of his soul with its hollow gaze. _

**Life** and  **death** maintained their fragilely thin relationship as well as it did with  _decay_ and _decomposition_ , with desquamation and transformation. He had obstinately resisted his own **adaptation** , until the excess and greed consumed him. He feels  **powerful** , with exponentially increasing zenith act of dominance clutching him as he welcomed his own revolution. 

“You getting to the point of fucking pathetic demise is  _laughable_ ,” how their laughs echo through the writhing nerve endings as every veins in his temple swell to discharge. “Let’s hear you laugh when I sever your jugular, or mangle your guts into a fucking knot.”   


He’d rather be removed in just  **one hopeful removal**  of his mental cruelty as the  **glinting silver** of blade, hidden beneath the threadbare, worn jacket pocket plunges into the gut of the client. How he’d paint the webs; latticed as upheavals of sounds and texture satiate him in shimmering kaleodoscope of his manic, menaced mind. As a soundless brillance of rakish, almost diabolic quirk of lips paint like a curling wave as the air streams thicker and potent with visceral possibility. 

Inside his chest pulses something huge, something full of longing and something unafraid as the sinking weight of the client entraps him between the graffitied walls and his own musk and blood. And how he becomes webbed with a **thousand traveling wisps**  of shadows as  _magmatic liquid fire_ cascades, as his feral gaze shoots up, drunk on  **adrenaline**.  


	4. Chapter 4

The body of the man slumps lifeless and Hannibal moves to let it fall to the ground. The flood of blood is slower now that the man has nearly bled out. He runs his tongue along the length of his own mouth lips closed. The taste was  **debauched**  to him like cheap vodka.

His steady hand is reaching for Nigel then coming to steady himself against his form. He can smell the blood on him wasn’t his and,  _it was a relief._ The only thing pounding was his chest. Hannibal’s other hand was pressed against his ribs.  **Blood**  seeps between  **his fingers** his head hanging close to Nigel’s shoulder.

**Its almost a lovers embrace** the way his hand grips Nigel’s neck. The bridge of his nose brushes his throat. Hannibal’s  **tangled thoughts**  are like small glimmers.  **Blinking lights** against the  **charcoal and burnt** halls that represent his beginnings. If we follow his thoughts they are only fragments.  **Separate scenes not meant to mingle.** Here for us they do.

The picture on his mind of  _his mother the last time he saw her smile. Mischa throwing bread to the swans. Nigel and Hannibal walking through the snow._ Nigel is carrying Mischa’s empty loop of the chain frozen to Hannibal’s neck to help him walk. He had tried to fight the soldiers when he saw the skin peel from  Hannibal as they cut the chain off.  _Mischa running out of the lodge determined to go to her mother._ Hannibal running to her bullets kicking up the ground around them as Hannibal finally gathered up Mischa and carries her back inside the lodge.

Heat presses into his mind sparks fly.  _Hannibal gasps against Nigel’s open mouth above his._ **It’s more then just kisses more than just sex.**  The burning feeling that ripped between his thighs lingered long after Nigel had left him. _‘I put my head down, **keep running away** from it I  **need to get away**  before it pulls me in. _ _ **I’m never ever getting close to anyone again**_ ’

Back at himself now in the alleyway emotions hang in his half lulled expression. He might have apologized then. Thoughts stacking until Hannibal falls back with the slightest of steps. He see’s Nigel’s hands are covered in is blood. The pain in his abdomen registers with a sharp rigger. _Shit._

 “Oops…” a hushed breath and then a chuckle parted by Lecter’s red smile. He gently staggers back until he is with his back to the wall. Sliding down Hannibal’s eyes closed his face looking cold.

_I need to get away before it pulls me in_ _So here I go, **Left** right, left  **right**  left  **wrong.**_

* * *

 

The searing sensation flares of from Hannibal’s front as the depth of the cut had been deeper than Nigel had thought, as more crimson flows along with the increasing sensation of Nigel’s own  **throbbing heart** , beating in _fastened increments_ as the reverberation carries upon the long gash. Through restraint of explosive fury, Nigel well knows, Hannibal doesn’t  _dare_ to show even the minutest hint of that  _emotion_ for anyone but himself. With him, everything became almost  **instantaneously prominent**  and  **profound**. Once it reached its bubbling point, there would be no retracting it. Like earthquake rattling and giving off  _aftershocks_ , although weakened from constant spawn of energy and force, was still capable of causing  **destruction**.  

He smells the unmistakable scents of old memories; maybe that’s why he’s still  **stuck** , almost _idle_ , standing and surrounded by miseries. But then, the stars in the firmament sits and gazes like they had been in eternity and he finds himself truly living.  ****People would have bet on his **imminent demise** , yet, the fact that they both have made it this far,  _standing_ , through screams of cells and scalding rush of blood urging to remain  **motionless** is a victory in itself. Whoever they had supposedly brought down in  _justice_ , when the revered had became even greater than himself. Perhaps that had been what Hannibal had intended -  _a becoming through the life force_. 

Such association for both life and death becomes even more  _inevitable_ within the blazing air within the deadened air of alleyway, without the ebb and wane of blood, now  **stagnant** and  **smoldering** hot against the web of his fingers. Yet, contrary to what he wants to believe, _Hannibal’s_  lingered, as he awaited with exquisite patience until the right opportune moment stroke upon itself. As he pulled the strings upon his  **orchestration** , everything would still fall upon him with a huge advantage  _favoring_ them. The **beating conflagration**  of the ocean’s depth stares into Hannibal; as the overwrought synapses of his brain going further haywire as the swelling tunnel of his gaze centers straight into the dead end - _past Hannibal’s form_ \- with a one-track thought. Even the blazing stars above their intangible homes couldn’t reach them; for him, they are a  **chaos of light**  beneath the clouds. The stained scent of sex and sweat and blood mingles and beats, as curvature of the pin-up girl on his carotid ripples with something that resembles promises of tomorrow’s life.   

 

> Their home is  **bound**  to the stars, like the last words that have left his lips before he arrived here -  _how many infinities would they have met in?_   _A fucking rendezvous of sorts? A dance from another reality?_   Like all the fucking time he’d forgotten about Hannibal’s name under the consuming weight of the sun. And he was too  _busy_ , **too fucking busy**  perhaps for even himself to be bound without the glory and soft hands of caressing - without the abstraction nor frankness, brutal honesty and clinical detail. Only  **dissemination** of discoveries found and utilized in the moment of being explored and all coming like a hurricane; so strong, yet so short-lived. 

 

_Thunderclaps roar_ , as the fucking heavens descended, hauling a storm through his way and brought Hannibal along with it. His scalding palm pushed through the raised and parted maw of the flesh as it creates a warm puddle upon his equally heated skin. The coarse granules of the wall feel rough against his skin as he stares at the intense  _crimson_ , contouring through his shaky hands, undulating in tandem with the shortness of his breath. The counteracting blood flow makes his head to dance in a  _whirling drowsiness_ as he advances, the fury in his voice imminent. 

“ _Too fucking reckless_ , Hannibal, even for you,” even when he himself had let ticking benevolence melt his conscience as vitriol swallowed him whole, the vacancy still washes over his eyes. Despite his hand reaching out,  **more steadied** as constant, wired melancholy overwhelms with **changed battlefield** of his future. “But violently delightful, addictive, even in our catastrophic failures.”   


So violent and so raw and so real - despite wanting to thrust a hand to caress the **thriving viscera** of his reflection, his slipped jacket losts its coherent shape as a bundle of fiborous fabric presses between their conflagratory warmth. “At least you are  _honest_ , and you couldn’t fucking fathom to let the  **darkness** choke me until my own damning truths feel like distant dreams. I hope they aren’t fucking dreams anymore.” 

* * *

 


	5. Chapter 5

Pain shoots through his nerves Hannibal wenches but is grateful for the pressure on the wound. He only blinks breathing sharply through his nose. If looks could kill what followed Nigel’s words was something between a deep longing and ‘ **go to hell**.’  _‘Your dreams be damn, Nigel.’_ he thought and kept to himself leaning his head against the wall. Hannibal was still furious and knows that he had better hold on to that anger a little longer.  _‘I was honest? Of course, I was honest._   ** _You see me_**.’ Hannibal’s mouth tries to make a sound but his lips don’t move. 

His eyes are pale red in the moonlight milky with the soft glow overhead. Soft glimmers of something plays behind his eyes. Intense feelings he won’t let slip beyond his mask and yet as he lays there it feels like it seeping from him like the blood from the wound just below his rips Hannibal’s eyes pull away from Nigel almost rolling as he bit down on his need to lash out. Cutting him down now wouldn't help Nigel did enough of his own self-loathing. Weakly Hannibal slides himself back up on his legs using the wall for support.

Leaning on Nigel was hard enough but he does it, despite all the anger the words come out “Can we go home now?” He said it ‘ **we** ’ and presses into him. “Since when did you carry that little gem you’ve got up your sleeve? That sounds like something you got from me.”

* * *

Hannibal’s fingers weren’t steady as he unbuttoned his shirt. It stuck to the skin where the blood had started to dry. He was listening for the water to start boiling with the needle and thread while trying to remove his shirt. The pain was there still but the only thing that frustrated him was the numbness in his arms.  _Asking for help would take a lot right now._ It felt a little bit like he was talking to air he lost sight of his doppelganger. Somewhere between footsteps and imagined ones he thought he heard a swear word or **two**  or  **three**. The silence was bearable but it tasted like a bright penny on his tongue.

 He closes his eyes for a second and the sound of seething water creates a watercolor effect behind his lids. The hidden blade sliced right through the man’s throat. It was something to be seen watching Nigel act on impulse he didn't even hesitate. Was that his first kill? Hannibal wanted to know, he wanted to ask him how it felt.  He feels something warm on his face but his eyes don't open. The blood loss has made him drowsy he doesn't react to the pain as his head lulls. Warm on his face and it spreads to a touch on his shoulder.   


Hannibal’s eyes open to find Nigel’s up close to his in his hand is the needle and thread still steaming. “Was it really that bad?” Hannibal shrinks at the sound of his own voice the active part of his brain knows he is delirious. He has stepped out of himself that the only way he could speak. “You couldn't have stayed and told me it was a mistake? I just woke in the middle of the night and you’re gone, not just one night but three. Then I find you back at that shithole. I can’t even stay here anymore, they are moving me up a level in my classes. I have to stay in the dorms as part of keeping this scholarship. So you can have your solitary life back.”

__

The future that they painted was tinted and washed with the silent tears that scraped his cheek, that once used to blush with  **ruddy, healthy, glowing complexion**. Theiir love didn’t have a fucking  _Disney proof happy ending_  or of the star-crossed lovers that fought by another’s side. They’d spend time dragging each other through  **memories** , attacking respective Lecter’s nerves and  _ravaging_ upon what was left of their being. The home that was once their  **stronghold** and leveled with  **intimacy** ,  **trust** and  **love** reduced to ruins, the wreckage left in their blackened hearts. His heart already had suffered a slow death; shedding hope like  **deciduous leaves**  every day until there was none. 

Their love sailing for some time, but to be ended up in a fucking shipwreck; fragile like the glass that awaited to be broken until the shards fit no more. He feels he’s  _deafened_ by the repetition of the  **melancholic rhythms**  of his never-soothing heartbeat, as his pulsating and scorched heart as the beat resonates with his heart and lyrics echo in his skull. “Don’t get so fucking full of yourself, I got it for myself, because I had to defend the wound that’s fucking worse than cut bleeding so fucking deep that there was no scab to heal,” endless  **agony** and  **anguish** , the pain that feels like a constant ache, a constant stain on the floor and the grimed window outside of his tattered mattress, as neglected and abandoned as his own being. “It’s your fucking  **pencil sharpening blade** , asshole.” 

* * *

How the onslaught of ascending spike of emotion pushes through the hardened veins of his gullet from deep within; as it would come in intermittent waves, crashing and enveloping him in its depths, stealing appetite and sleep. Yet, he refuses to  _drift_ away from the shore where he would lie with a straight face. And despite wanting to break from such  **irrepairable isolation** , he iinhales the heaviness that makes him one with the  **galeful sea**. Without a tranchant gaze directed back at Hannibal along with his reposte, he lets the echoes of his words thrum in his skull, sending  **pulsating self-doubt**  and all the  **questions** that make him question his diminished worth. 

_What would he become? He still lives with a heart that yearns for his own name to be revered and resurrected from all the broken, hollow vessel that he has become._

And everything; through the  **explosive overworking**  of muscles and bones, the  _conserved energy_  makes his body to weave around the weighty lassitude, his movement becoming sluggish as the  **adrenaline** and  **tenseness** of the commotion further disquiets his swimming mind. Jaws tightly set and chin tucked in, he gazes at his own _beaten reflection_  and forces himself a faint smile while he waits for the sanitarized appertunances. 

**Worry** engraves his countenance, though  _imperceptible_ through the rippling crescent shapes of the steaming water, darkening along with the peek of sun’s glow rising. Still  _unsatisfied_ , a **vindictive light**  shines from his eyes as his hand caresses over with a gossamer touch, extremely careful to not provoke any more  **excruciating pain**  already present as his features harden. He plucks his sinking body from the inevitable quagmire as the soil clings onto the kneecaps.  ****Shirt open, Nigel siilently takes Hannibal’s hands by his wrists and moves them away, off to his sides, to finally pull the bloodied fabric away and view the wound. Half-dried and sticky blood made for a careful process of opening the garment, and the thing revealing was a **maw of red** ,  _drooling crimson drops_  as torn teeth gnashed over the swift sweep of the blade that had torn open upon the impact of the man’s precision beneath his ribs. 

Already, there’s a red imprint from where they’d had their commotion, a shape that, given time, would turn into a dark bruise and likely cause him  **pain** every time he laughed for the next week or so. “Do you really think I like to fucking saturate myself further in  **dreaded apathy** , in a fucking shattered state? I’m further  _tortured_ in dreams if I were to find sleep in the darkness that consumed the night.”   


A slew of  **fury** and  **defeat** mars the perturbed atmosphere as he says with no hesitancy and a certain sharpness in his voice. Stare _razor-sharp_ , as though he could kill another someone, but it is more disciplined more than impulsive. 

He recalls the orphanage, as he longed, drowned and gasped to breathe both Hannibal and Mischa’s name, as he had been the one to be dragged, with his defiant stubbornness hung heavy as wiry limbs  _frantically_ refused to be further tainted by the **wicked delight** of the men who came more like a blitzkrieg. And with this state of living a life with a fucking fabricated heart on his sleeve, this thought allows him to leave the  **battlefield** and sink into the **deceptive notion** of secured fate and future is the ultimate destruction he does not want to pursue further. 

“Do whatever the  _fuck_ you please, you were always drawn to the **creation of beauty** , always disregarding the _always-present pain_.”  ****He is more than certain that Hannibal knew this was going to hurt, so he didn’t even bother to _announce_ it. One hand held Hannibal’s open shirt out of the way, the other haphazardly cleaning the site he was about to stitch. In streaks of red on the white fabric, blood came away from his skin, staining the gause pad with the dried cakes and the fresh drops. He does not know if he wants to be further broken by being opened like the **fresh tang** of Hannibal’s blood, as if it had been his own as the  **midnight black ink**  seeps through the depth of his endured suffering. 


	6. Chapter 6

His head was spinning against Nigel’s words and battling the fog in his own head. The  **sting** of the needle was welcome it gave Hannibal’s mind something else to focus on, a **fourth** train of thought. His gaze draws back to Nigel and his eyes are softer like he is trying to let go of some of the  **anger.**  ‘ _Any’_  sign of Hannibal’s belongings had already been removed, he had moved out yesterday. This wasn’t guilt, ‘ _Jesus, they really were having a spat._ ’ Hannibal wished he could roll his eyes his tongue moving to the inside of his cheek. “Well Nigel, if you had stayed…we could have talked it out. I’ll still visit on time off and weekends. You only get your space back and it looks like we need it ourselves.”

He paused and the feeling was starting to return to his face. Eyes drift between Nigel’s **brown hues** and the  **stitching**. Hannibal notices his careful handling if Nigel was actually angry he would feel it in the pull of the thread.  **Over,**   _under_ **over,**   _under,_  it almost lulled him to close his eyes.  **He doesn’t let it go.**  Hannibal had just watched the thoughts swim on the surface of his eyes he knows there is an answer. “Your evading…” Hannibal paused for punctuation. “That’s my blood on your hands right now, how does it make you feel? Would that be an easier thing to answer?” dulled annoyance in his voice because deep down he knows he doesn’t need the reassurance  **not really**. The pinning need doesn’t settle well with him he longs for the time where he no longer needs  _conventional_ reassurance. **Emotion comes**  too easy when you are still **growing into yourself.**

It would be much more convenient if he felt nothing at all. He thought he had found that after he’d looked into the eyes of the men who killed Mischa and heard who they really were in their final moments. Lady Murasaki had been his moon and stars. She had been the pair of watchful eyes that had witnessed his t beginning of his becoming. Eventually, she turned away, how was Nigel any different? A blink and his face grew hot as the thoughts connect. ‘ _Come to think of it_ ’ the young man considered, ‘ _Nigel didn't even flinch when I ripped into that man’s throat. He doesn't even know the truth about Mischa. **We ate her too.** ’_

Nigel had  **experienced it** , had  **been there**. The back of Hannibal’s neck prickled and the cold pit of his stomach flipped.  _What if Nigel had seen more then he did?_  seen more after Hannibal had blacked out with a broken arm left with Nigel in the barn.  _What if he had known_  what was  **in**  the **broth fed**  to them both half  **conscious.** The question is always there, but he never asks.  _He can’t._

Reflecting back on the alley scene there were three dead bodies now. With any luck, the police would just dub it drug related. Plenty of discarded syringes and pills that could be missed used as evidence. Hannibal had taken one mans gun and fired at close range to distort the bite mark and pierce through the arteries in the neck. Flicks of the red spray still covered his face. The needle in Nigel’s hand dug deeper in the last string. Hannibal watches the glint off the scissors as he cut away from the knot. It still felt like he had a gaping hole but he knew he would live. The pain was always worse that way because  **you know you aren’t dying.**

He’d even up on anyone understanding him. The light of dreams and the stars doesn’t fit here so why should he trust this silent bond between them? 

“I need to know, Nigel. I need to hear you say it because I can’t let you in otherwise. I’m not half in half out, please.   _Was it really so bad?”_ Hannibal finds himself trading between feeling like this is being truthful and begging. Gritting his teeth tight mouthed he half sways the anger on his face. 

* * *

 

His form manifested itself into one of those big wounded cats caught in a snarl of a poacher, his _filmy, dilated hazel_ maintains expansive as the **hurtling galaxies** explode beneath the vastness of them.  _Startled_ and spectacularly  _parched_ , he tips his head backwards to aid what little saliva he has to swallow, to quench the crackling inches of his  **coiled throat**. “There are so many fucking  _contradictions_ between us and  **you’d never even fucking consider to**   **meet me halfway**? Where were you when I actually wanted to talk?” 

Cracks between themselves become too  _obscene_ to ignore and turning blind eyes to the cavernous gap between them, revealing a cauldron of **repressed feelings**  and all the compacted surge of  **neglect** and  **loneliness** he felt from the orphanage, not only in the hands that once bound him to crash and crumble, as he’d crawl and lay without a  _foundation_ and a _pillar_ ; so emptiness abounds as the empire of his vehement obstinence fades into the darkness. 

As his usual guttural tone sinks a few more notches as syllables drag over the fragments of gravel and glass. “I feel fucking lost in the allure of my savagely beautiful  **maelstrom** , or becoming like a  **thunderstorm** after years of draught - powerful and beautiful, enrapturing me. Is that what you want to fucking hear?” A sight for sore eyes, indeed. And his body feels as if it’s struggling to gain composure, so does his mind -  _fumbling_ and  _stumbling_ through nonsensicality of his profuse disemboguing of manic violence. Even the licking caress of the cool air conditioned, emitting  _continuous sensation_ , however that may reduce to a white noise upon his usual healthy state, now it drills into his eardrums like a  **long, suppressed growl** of the resting beast _. Is he a murderer or a savior?_

All he wants to do is for his knuckles to graze Hannibal’s skin and thrust his already tainted flesh into the heart of where everything stems from;  ****all of his accumulated wounds are like bruises that never go away; a **widening bruise**  in his mind, consuming over the chambers of his heart and lungs like fine dust he doesn’t even perceive breathing in. It lingers there like  _trauma_ , but he wouldn’t call his own a trauma. It might have molded him as he still had been a  **malleable** and **pliable** like a clump of recently peeled block of clay. And the scar may serve as the  **mark of survival** , but all he would absorb from it is that he had impulsively never weighed the consequences wisely before making any decisions that could lead him to his happiness or his demise. It just may be both, as he lacks the strength to  _dwell_ on feelings that are unhealthy for his soul.  **For he is already corrupted.**

Always looking for something to make their marks on, whether they be a city or a person. It could be the sickest and rawest as the twisted form takes a super-predator or a prey. Even when there would be no lies in his **fiery, wild emotions** , it could be all lies when  _fictional_. This was nothing from a fiction. He had been molded in clay, baked to resemble  _marble_ and now he was chipping and cracking away beneath the  **curved needle**  which he holds. And he knows, human will is feeble and lethargic when it’s pushed beyond the catered tolerence, despite having been revamped and restored to cling onto sanity, when everything detaches with unbearable struggle to torrent himself further with  **crashing crimson waves**. Then he’d  _dissipate, disperse_  and _disappear_ , leaving only carnage in his wake. 

Whether something snapped inside of him or things he himself found unable to explain without any degree of accuracy as he prevailed over gushing of blood fueling the dormancy of shifting tectonic plates of his volatility, seeping hues of  _contusion_ and  _bruises_ , plucking splinters out of his shoulders and legs, what have you. Now looking more like a stained piece of meat under the mercy of the world, the blood - Hannibal’s blood - had soaked deep into his shirt, mingling with his sweat and gradually drying under the whipping air to a dark brown hardness.

All of a sudden, he becomes aware that if he had survived this **much threaded pain** , so intricately weaved through each atom of his body and veins stammered with deeply rooted throbs, signalling the persistent fight between  _life_ and  _death_. Giving into the carnal language of flesh and blood as everything would crush the pedagogical realm of their dissimilar worlds. All the impressive montage of his body’s **strident caw** , edited by his own  _subconsciousness_ to be mulled and played over and over. And each  **undeniable agony** of rewinding and reliving through that experience becomes so much more than  _memory_ \- it metamorphoses into an unchecked need for  **bloodshed**. Perhaps that’s why it had been so effortless and executed in a blink of an eye. 

Hannibal’s words has become a  _liability_. And he can’t quite fathom to say the words out aloud due to the  **friction** of his chest; yet even when no sound renders muffled beyond the cavern of his wired head, he stems enough strength beneath the captivating warmth of the same makeup, spilling forth. As does the fervency of his tremulous hazel that pulses life within it. 

“I do not want us to be on the brink of breaking apart even further. We’ve had fucking enough of bars of  **isolation** forged from the hands of a  _broken reality_.” All interwoven with the supple flesh of what used to be, but now, every fucking thing becomes jagged ebb and flow of wretched bereaved heart of theirs. 


	7. Chapter 7

Nigel’s words strike something that was already lingering in Hannibal’s mind. Visually his eyes change losing the sparks that play with the life in his stare.  _Where was he?_ A hard swallow slums down his narrow throat.  Killing the men who had chained them up like dogs. Trying to  **chase**  names and faces he’d only seen in **fever dreams**. Trying to understand why he was so different why only a  **fraction**  of the boy had survived that long winter in the woods.  _Had his heart really died in the snow with Mischa?_

_Fuck you Nigel,_ thoughts made Hannibal’s gaze bitter, the kind between two old friends who deep down missed each other.  _Where the fuck were you?_ The question was turned toward Nigel in Hannibal’s mind _._ Out of his head finally, thoughts formed words  “I had no idea where you ended up after I left for Paris. I would have written you.  _I wanted to_.” He may have even shared with him about what had grown into his  _revenge._ He had **trusted someone**  with it but when  _she_ was faced with it  **she ran**. He wasn’t ready to even think of the word trust, no, this  **other side**  to him must stay buried for now even with Nigel.

_ He wants to, he wants to tell him everything that has happened. _

Anger twisted his already exhausted face and yet Lecter waited for a few beats between Nigel’s words before responding. The sarcasm wasn’t held from his voice as his expression seemed listless. “I wasn’t aware you even wanted to discuss it. You spend so much time running from it as much as I do Nigel.” At least Lecter shared in the insult and his own lack thereof. “Don’t justify your shit stained life to me, like you had no control over what’s happened to you. I don’t care about what got you under the thumb and flat on your back. You are drowning Nigel. What are you going to do when the drugs and sex don’t dull your pain? What will you have?”  _Nothing_.

“Wake up, and let go of some of that pain. You are better than this, you are perfectly capable of change.”

_ I want something better for you as sweet as your self-destruction is. _

Again the confession from Nigel’s mouth crosses Lecter’s expression somewhere between anger and endearment. Nigel was still close enough for Hannibal to reach up and pull Nigel’s face down to his by the lip of his collar and kiss him if only to wipe Nigel’s half hearted gaze off his chiseled face. Pain shoots through his ribs but its bearable for now what he wants is right in front of him. Half lidded eyes move away from Nigel’s face. “You may be the only person, I could stand to be this way with. I want to stay with you, Nigel.”

Slight emphasis on  _you_ , and could be taken as more than just what follows Something amid the sound of a sigh and a groan passes his lips. “But I still have to stay up at the medical school.”

* * *

 

No  **love** , nor no  **peace** exists for the wicked, as he’d rather spend **adrift on endless seas**  than to forge fragments of his memories and dreams to tattoo his heart with ink of black. He didn’t want to leave, but he does not want to look back to the time when his thoughts had been locked up somewhere safe where no bullies could  _harvest_ them up to mock both his physical and emotional injury further. So he’d thought; he’d  **disappear** , somehow gone without a trace and sew what’s left of them intact. Of course he missed Hannibal; and that every single day onward had been so much longer than the last. When he moved one small step forward, he felt like he was a **thousand steps back**  every time he blinked. And when his aching bones never properly healed, how their shared memories also slipped through his hands and mind like **grains of sand** , despite having appeared so indifferent and careless. 

He had coped with unpleasantries of every strand of his memories weaved into the subconscious, but all the  **suspended dusts**  -  _nonadmitted flaws and all the garbage_  - illuminates down to every hidden corner of his soul to be explored yet again. Through the unblinking, fervent gaze, his mind dances down the memory lane and even when he’s dwelling within the other’s milieu, he feels exceptionally alone. 

_Does he still lay awake at night, recalling the Polaroids of the unfurled stars, how his cheeks were drenched in frustrated and misery at the ridiculous possibilities of them?_  Yes, he had felt lingering, impossibly tender touch upon his torn cheek as Hannibal had wiped his sweat and tears away, followed by what he thinks as a sweet, equally gossamer as before kiss, because he could feel Hannibal’s bated breath in all of him earnestly. 

And he wonders he would ever be able to forget all the **unrealized thousands of possibilities** as his world exploded with those scattered puzzle pieces.  _Alone_ and  _separate_ , to be fit together when he had been away from it all. Another thing he wonders is through the staccato of movement as blotches of crimson unfurl away from Hannibal’s flesh, each layer would remove and bring a new vulnerability until they were bare in all ways that neither of them had expected. 

His recurrent feel of  **emptiness** and  **melancholy** , he would maintain his concreteness though he might  _crack_ , mend himself in earnest. Even when he might get trampled on with bouts of surging emotions. For the most of times, he’s  _compacted_ in  **sinews** and  **blood** ,  **bone** and  **marrow** as he lets his work define himself. “Didn’t you ever give a fucking thought that may have been my intention? I’ve succeeded then.” 

His casual declaration continues, without ever moving a trace of his gaze  ****from the patched-up wound, for human mind was a **resilient** and an  **inexorable** thing. It just didn’t know the concept of ‘ _giving the fuck up_.’ Never one to let something slide as it mattered so much to him, whether it was his unending source of both grief and longing, nostalgia and something he never would dare to experience again. It hurt to admit  _verbally_ , both still strangers to each other despite having spent the formative years together and having suffered together, yet the resounding memories were  **uncannily similar**. Though it could cause  **wild destruction** and create a  **mismatched mess** , he would always be drawn into the persistent nature of the potency of those unfurled memories; even when reduced to dust as the last perceivable etch of smoke leave its premise, it still clings upon the chambers of his lungs like it does a _permeated whirl_  of nicotine as it morphed into colossal mountainous waves, the swelling chorus rising up like the tower as individual drops of the viscous wax meld and blurred into thick streaks, pouring down upon him.

“ _Violence_ , all that fucking desire to have  **hope** , to  _strive_ for better in this life for both our fucking sakes,  **warring** against the crushing weight of despondent reality I’ve come to know more intimately than the most. Don’t evade like you fucking don’t know it.” It’s his burden and his terror that not even Hannibal could alleviate. 

_How many sleepless nights had he endured, as he resisted all the pain without ever crying out aloud, lockced beneath so much misery?_  Yet, he knows the **tangible presence**  and the  **warmth** of their bodies melting in the dark had given him so much comfort and peace, despite dreading the next day’s daybreak when everything crushed and became nonexistent. Despite the vision of Hannibal’s face becoming ever-so captivating, but he cannot get it to linger; for he wants to hold his twin close, he wants to hug him so tight that he crushes his bones until his body disintegrates. Perhaps they both could cover their respect ashes and dust that clouds and fogs their minds and let all the eerie, sickening silence that hangs over them melt. 

“You could stay here,  _we_ could stay here tonight.” 


End file.
